Intimate portraits of everyday heroism and suffering.
A firsthand account of two lives that came to tragic ends.
Journalist Orkin (Ground Zero Wars, 2017, etc.) met investigative reporter Mike Ruppert in 2004 at a symposium marking the third anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and they later moved in together. Ten years later after their first meeting, after Ruppert committed suicide, Orkin began to produce blog entries, compiled in this book, as a way to explain his troubled state of mind. As she frankly states, “This is a flesh and blood, warts-and-all portrait written in the belief that in the end, Mike and his transcendent work and critically important ideas will prevail.” One of the more harrowing sequences involves Ruppert’s self-imposed exile in Venezuela, where he was alarmed by mysterious physical ailments and disillusioned with the country’s “Cuban-style medical system.” Here, the author includes a series of frantic emails, some her own, that effectively capture an escalating sense of confusion and panic. Some readers may be put off by Orkin’s nonstandard capitalization in these exchanges, but overall, this is a minor issue, as is the blog posts’ occasional deviation from chronological order. For instance, there’s a eulogy for Ruppert in the middle of the text and an account of the author’s first meeting with her subject at the very end. The lion’s share of the book recounts the period after Ruppert’s return to the United States, when he lived with the author in Brooklyn Heights in New York City. Readers will enjoy Orkin’s more deliberative style here, featuring solid narration and revealing dialogue, as she tells of how Ruppert’s mental health struggles and painful physical issues tested their relationship; it contrasts sharply with previous, hastily composed correspondence. The book also includes a much shorter work that’s devoted to Orkin’s mother’s life and final months. It opens with the author’s poignant assertion that her parent “did not go gentle into that good night.” Many will identify with the author’s feelings of helplessness and frustration in the face of woefully inadequate health care and social services systems. Her story of the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease may be universal in nature, but the specific details are powerful.
Intimate portraits of everyday heroism and suffering.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-5007-7161-4
Page Count: 328
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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